It's what you'd expect from a movie by a horror/splatter make-up effects maestro... but no, that's unfair. Yoshihiro Nishimura has been directing films since 1984 and I like some of his work, e.g. Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl. It's specifically this movie that I didn't get along with.

The ideas are great. The film's overflowing with gross imagination, some of which made me think of Garth Ennis's Crossed. The zombies queuing up to be beheaded so that they can fly through the sky as a missile cloud of angry biting heads, for instance. These zombies also have forehead antlers that can be snapped off and ground up into a drug that makes your head explode. We're supposed to believe that people take this stuff? I'd have expected even the most desperate junkies to avoid that.

There's a zombie bar, with dancers and musicians. Are we seeing zombie civilisation? They're organised enough to round up living humans and keep them in cages. They even have a queen, played by Eihi Shiina from Takashi Miike's Audition and Yoshihiro Nishimura's Tokyo Gore Police. I'll describe her completely absurd creation. In a flashback from before the zombie holocaust, our heroine, Kika, is being hunted down by her serial-killing cannibal mother (Rikka) and uncle (Yasushi). They're cooking Kika's father. Rikka dances and Yasushi kills policemen... but then a meteorite falls from space and hits Rikka, leaving a hole in her chest that you could stick your head through. She's now literally heartless, not to mention most of her lungs and ribs. Is she dead? No, she just needs improvised medical attention. Rikka punches her hand into Kika's chest, pulls out her daughter's heart and puts it in her own chest cavity. This crude heart transplant technique works, thanks to a yellow slime glow and a starfish alien that suggests a homage to Warning from Space (1956).

Kika survives this. She acquires a Cyberman chest unit and becomes a zombie-fighting android.

We see how the zombie plague led to the apocalyptic present day. There was a wall sealing off Japan's infected North and a difference of political opinion over this. (Had this film been made ten years later, you'd have read this as a reference to Donald Trump.) Nishimura said that there was "quite a lot of satire and social criticism in this film... I describe what ensues after the nation splits in two, with humans controlling one half and zombies the other, and the kind of discrimination that would occur within Japan were something severe like this to happen." He was taking inspiration from George Romero. Anyway, the bleeding heart left-wing Prime Minister insists that zombies are people and won't let people kill them... until he's disappearing under a zombie horde, whereupon he has a change of heart. Too late, too quick. His loyal people don't listen to him. The man's an idiot, but so is his right-wing rival. That guy's an Adolf Hitler cosplayer who assassinated his predecessor and makes girls wear Japan's politically unacceptable wartime flag.

There's a tiny amount of sleaze. A girl gets her top removed by zombies. This and the horrible things that follow aren't even the tiniest bit sexy.

All this might sound great in principle, but I got bored. The film's not interested in plot or character-driven storytelling. It drags. The protagonist is one-dimensional. It's two hours of wacky gore that mostly exists for its own sake, not to serve a story. The zombie baby looks cool, but so what? The film's first 48 minutes are technically a pre-credits sequence. Asami appears, but too late and in a forgettable minor role. Yurei Yanagi is good, mind you. Watch this film only if drunk or stoned and in the mood for two hours of wild nonsense, with outrageous amounts of gushing blood.